Gerry Colgan reviews Displace in Project Cube, Dublin.
This 40-minute work is the first production of Anonymous, which describes itself as wishing to create theatre through the spoken word, dance, music, song, object manipulation, light and sound - a form of "total theatre". That certainly covers most of the tools of the stage; but it's not really the clothes, is it? It's how you wear them.
On this evidence, the company has yet to learn how to fuse some or all of these elements into a coherent offering. The arbitrarily lower-cased displace purports to have a theme of immigrants in Ireland, developed through a series of loosely linked sketches. These are superficial and at times merely comic, never likely to accumulate to a meaningful whole.
The play opens with a Bosnian couple eating and talking in (presumably) Serbo-Croat - an indication of the level of communication being attempted. This is followed by scenes depicting the arrival of immigrants in Dublin. A typical one is that of people queuing, a slapstick affair in which they jostle each other acrobatically. Another has immigrants coming through passport control, in which an irrelevant gimmick is employed to depict their photos. Later, the Bosnian woman turns up seeking to rent an over-priced, shabby room, the previous occupant of which committed suicide. A Chinese man is sent to an absurd number of offices to have forms signed and stamped. He finally loses his cool and declares his intention to return to his homeland. It ends as it began, with the Bosnian couple again supping their stew.
The immigrant scene here may well be a shambles - but it is not this shambles, more a workshop for the company than a meaningful production.
Runs to Jan 14
